Page 33 of Don't Cross the Blue Line
Here goes nothing.
I grab the shelving unit. One foot on the bottom shelf. The metal groans under my 210 pounds. I push up a tile. Dust rains down. The darkness above is somehow darker than the darkness below.
I haul myself up.
Because somewhere out there, my teammate is going up against something that’s left him a shell of himself. Because even if he framed me for doing drugs and ruined my reputation—I’m still Blue Line Beckett.
It stops here.
Six
Everly
This is the best writing I’ve done in months. Maybe ever.
I’m on fire. The words are pouring faster than I can type them—not crafted, not constructed, just pulled out from the spaces of my heart where my best stuff comes from.
I’m barely thinking. Just feeling my way through this scene, as if…
Shoot, as if I’m Jake and feeling like the world doesn’t see me.
Let’s not dive into that too deeply, okay? Sure, I get that maybe he’s a little bit more like me than I’d like to admit—I mean, I am aware of the wig and the pen names. But really, this is about Beck—er, Jake. And his issues, thank you so much.
But now I’m in Lily’s POV, and it feels perfect.
On the screen, Lily, a magazine journalist on assignment with the team (yes, it’s the forbidden-workplace-romance trope), is standing in the tunnel beneath the arena, watching Jake tape his wrists before the game.
Lily had studied Jake Reeves for three months. She had a file. She had color-coded tabs. She had a system of cross-referenced notes that would make a CIA analyst weep with professional envy, and she’d been absolutely, categorically certain she knew everything worth knowing about the man they called the Blue Line.
She did not know about the tape.
He wound it slowly—wrist, palm, wrist again—with the methodical patience of a man performing a ritual so familiar his hands could do it without consulting his brain. His face was doing something she’d never seen in a press conference or a postgame interview or any of the fifty-three video clips she’d bookmarked for “research purposes” and then watched at two a.m. for purposes that were decidedly less research and more pitiful.
He was humming. Under his breath. Off key and unselfconscious and so fundamentally human that it hit her center mass in the chest.
She recognized the song. It was the one that had been playing in the coffee shop the morning he’d spilled an entire latte on her notes and then tried to help clean it up and made it worse and apologized four times.
Oh no, Lily thought. Oh no no no no no.
Because the Jake Reeves in her file—the one with the stats and the defensive record and the nickname that sounded like a geological feature—was manageable. Studyable. Keep-at-arm’s-length-able. But this version? The one with the tape and the humming and the off-key rendition of a song that meant something to both of them?
This version was a problem. This version had a heartbeat and bad pitch and hands that moved with a gentleness no scouting report had ever mentioned, and she was standing in a tunnel, watching him like a woman who had come to observe a specimen and accidentally discovered a person.
She should leave. Every functioning brain cell was screaming retreat—back up the tunnel, back to the press box, back to the safe, clinical distance that kept her from doing something stupid, like caring about a hockey player who hummed off key and couldn’t survive a latte without a casualty.
Her feet didn’t move. Traitors. Both of them.
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Tears slide down my cheeks and drop onto the keyboard. I don’t even bother wiping them, because there’s no time. The words can’t stop. The scene is alive, and Jake is finally a person instead of a specimen, and Lily is completely falling for him.
Finally.
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“You’re lurking,” Jake said without turning around. Casual.
“I’m not lurking. I’m observing. There’s a professional distinction.”
